Artist Statement – Zibeyda Seyidova

Zibeyda Seyidova’s practice unfolds at the edge of silence, where painting and moving image become less instruments of representation than vessels of invocation. Working across oil painting and video art, she resists figuration, aligning with an Islamic sensibility that refrains from depicting the living and the divine. Instead, her work constructs abstract fields of geometry, texture, light, and duration that operate as meditations on absence, infinity, and the unseen.

In Seyidova’s visual language, geometry functions as a metaphysical proposition. Diagonals, planes, and solitary vertical forms—whether fixed on canvas or unfolding through time—are not merely compositional choices but reflections of tawḥīd, the indivisible unity of God. Her works become thresholds: austere, minimal structures that gesture toward an unseen order. Through reduction and repetition, she invites the viewer into a contemplative state where the visible strains toward the invisible.

Materiality and temporality play central roles in this process. In painting, thick, textured brushstrokes emphasize oil as both veil and revelation. In video, slow movement, restrained light, and durational stillness extend this inquiry into time itself. Across both media, matter becomes paradoxical: it conceals as it discloses, echoing the dual qualities of the divine as both ẓāhir (manifest) and bāṭin (hidden). Surface and screen alike are presented not as images but as presences—traces of intentionality, relics of silence.

Her works may initially appear empty, but they are charged with meaning. This emptiness is not void but plenitude, resonating with Qur’anic imagery of light, shadow, and breath. Through restraint, Seyidova reactivates the metaphysical ground of Islamic abstraction. She does not reproduce ornamental tradition but distills its essence into a radical ontology of form, space, and duration.

Ultimately, Seyidova’s practice stages a profound paradox: the finite as a gesture toward infinity, the material as a trace of the immaterial. Whether on canvas or in moving image, each work becomes a form of visual dhikr—a remembrance without words—where art itself gestures toward the unrepresentability of Allah, not as subject, but as horizon.